Liberal Brooklyn Prosecutor Faces Unlikely Foes: Liberal Activists

Ken Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, speaking at a news conference in February with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, left. Mr. Thompson has faced intense criticism from advocates for criminal-justice reform.Credit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Not long after word emerged that a former New York City police officer would not serve time in prison for the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley, a protest erupted on the street outside the home of Ken Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney.

Showing up at 1 a.m., the demonstrators banged on drums and waved a banner — “#ByeKen: Blood on Your Hands” — then began haranguing Mr. Thompson’s neighbors. “We want you to know you live next door to someone complicit in a murder!” they shouted. “In the murder of black people here in New York City!”

By any standard, the action was unusual — and unusually personal — not least because Mr. Thompson, who is black, campaigned on the promise of restoring justice to Brooklyn’s black communities and took several steps toward fulfilling that goal. In his first two years in office, he has ended prosecutions for most low-level marijuana offenses, established a program to help offenders clear open warrants from their records, strengthened a unit that examines wrongful convictions, created a “young adult” court and pursued the police for line-of-duty misconduct in at least four cases where the victims were minorities.

Yet as his tenure has progressed, Mr. Thompson’s most determined opponents have not been conservative law-and-order types. Instead, they have come from a constituency one might have assumed would be his ally: advocates for criminal-justice reform.

“There’s an overwhelming disenchantment with him in this community,” said Keegan Stephan, a veteran activist who has taken part in the protests against Mr. Thompson. “It would be wrong to suggest he hasn’t done good things, but many people who supported him at first are criticizing him now.”

At the heart of this community is a small and diverse array of grass-roots groups whose members have staged protests across the city and have undertaken a scathing social-media campaign against Mr. Thompson, a Democrat, and his office. That campaign, laced with caustic Twitter posts and videos on Facebook, has been inspired in part by Mr. Gurley’s family, which has bitterly attacked the district attorney, and has found support among several officials, like State Assemblyman Charles Barron, a firebrand Democrat from Brooklyn.

In recent weeks, the demonstrators have started to compare Mr. Thompson to Anita Alvarez, the state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., who lost her job over the case of Laquan MacDonald in Chicago, and Tim McGinty, the Cleveland prosecutor who was voted out of office for his handling of the death of Tamir Rice. Branding Mr. Thompson a sellout and a traitor, they have begun to issue demands that he resign.

There would seem to be an irony in liberal protesters’ openly condemning a liberal district attorney. But those who have found fault with Mr. Thompson — including public defenders who have joined the activists in the substance, if not style, of their complaints — have claimed that he applied standards of justice for the former officer, Peter Liang, in Mr. Gurley’s death that were different from those used in the cases of ordinary people, many of whom were black or Hispanic and charged with minor crimes.

“Thompson sought to afford access to meaningful justice for Mr. Liang,” two officials of the Legal Aid Society wrote in an opinion article shortly after the district attorney recommended probation for Mr. Liang. “Sadly, our clients are not given the same consideration.”

Mr. Thompson is hardly the first public figure in the city to have faced the challenge of enacting liberal policies in a job that often demands a dose of compromise and pragmatism. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has also managed to put in place several planks of his liberal agenda while taking criticism from the left on issues like policing and housing. Some of his ostensible allies have gone so far as to hint that they will run against him in the next mayoral election, in 2017.

Mr. Thompson, whose supporters have said he is interested in running for higher office, declined to publicly discuss his critics. But after the rally at his home last month, his aides released a statement in his name that read, “These efforts to harass and intimidate my family, frighten my young children and disturb my neighbors at 1 in the morning will not deter me from doing what is right.”

For any district attorney — let alone the first black one in Brooklyn’s history — the Gurley case would have been a test.

Photo

Melissa Butler, center, a friend of Akai Gurley, crying at a press conference in March, after Mr. Thompson recommended that the officer who shot Mr. Gurley not serve jail time.Credit
Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

In November 2014, Mr. Liang, a probationary officer, was on patrol in a dark stairwell of a public-housing project when he fired a shot that ricocheted and struck Mr. Gurley in the heart. A three-month investigation followed as the city reeled from protests over a lack of charges in the case of Eric Garner, who died after a confrontation with police officers on Staten Island. After the Gurley inquiry, Mr. Thompson secured a manslaughter indictment against Mr. Liang, who was convicted this year.

Then, in March, a month after the trial, Mr. Thompson announced that he wanted “justice not revenge,” and he asked the judge not to send Mr. Liang to prison. Demonstrations began almost immediately.

Two weeks after Mr. Liang was sentenced, the furor found new fuel with the start of the trial of Marcell Dockery. Mr. Dockery, then 16, had set fire to a mattress in a hallway of his Coney Island high-rise in April 2014; the blaze that ensued killed a police officer. Mr. Dockery, who is black, was charged with felony murder, a provision of the law that permits even an unintentional death to be treated as a murder if the killing occurred while another major crime was being committed — in this case, arson. He was convicted this month and now faces 25 years to life prison.

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Though there were clear legal differences between the cases, many activists have found it hard to swallow the divergent outcomes.

“It hits a raw nerve when you see a police officer walk away from killing a young black man, especially when a young black man is looking at jail for killing a police officer,” said Josmar Trujillo, an activist who runs New Yorkers Against Bratton, a reference to the police commissioner. “Something about that crystallizes the injustice that people feel and see.”

In Twitter exchanges, Mr. Thompson’s chief spokesman has asserted that any comparison between the Liang and Dockery cases is wrongheaded given the felony murder distinction.

Some of the tension is rooted in the age-old battle between those who work for incremental remedies and those who reach for fundamental change.

“While Thompson has embraced reforms that acknowledge the limits of the punitive approach, he’s still the district attorney and is operating in a punitive framework,” said Alex S. Vitale, an associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who studies law enforcement issues. “But the activist movement is feeling its power and wants dramatic action, not just someone tinkering with the system.”

The dispute also reflects a clash of perspectives that has surfaced many times after police killings across the country. It has been said — most notably by David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City — that activists, particularly black ones, look at these killings through the long lens of history, in which specific facts and individual cases dissolve into an overarching narrative of continuing abuse and a lack of accountability. But that, of course, is not the lens through which a district attorney, weighing evidence and making legal judgments, looks.

“The power structure, whether black or white, tends to focus on the incidents themselves, on what happened in the moment,” Mr. Kennedy said. “But there’s a different way of looking, one that considers a very long history of agents of the law doing people harm.”

This difference of vision, Mr. Kennedy said, has become especially pronounced at a time when so many of the facts that inform the debate about policing are in flux and the battle lines of that debate are still being drawn. In the past two years alone, just in New York alone, impassioned arguments have occurred about the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, its community policing efforts, the usefulness of prosecuting minor crimes and the value of keeping Rikers Island as the city’s main jail. On top of that, there have been many traumatic public events: Mr. Garner’s death, the widespread protests it inspired, a police revolt against Mr. de Blasio and the ambush killing of two officers in Brooklyn.

In that context, Mr. Kennedy said, it was no surprise that the conversation has remained contentious — and occasionally confusing.

“The city and the country are in movement on these issues in a sudden, dramatic way,” he said. “It’s very hard to sort out exactly what’s going on.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2016, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Liberal District Attorney Is Facing Unlikely Critics: Activists on the Left. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe